This basic feature has a bug though, a problem that affects all schools to varying degrees and acts as a drag anchor on their efforts to provide quality education to all their students. The problem is that it’s awful being in or near the bottom of that ranking. Imagine you’re one of the hundreds of thousands of kids aged 11 to 16 currently getting 1s and 2s (old money Fs and Es) whose target grades are 3s. How would you approach school? Try your hardest to prove that you’re dumber than the average kid, even though turning those 1s into 3s makes virtually no difference to your opportunities post 16?

Why try?

The incentives for children in this position are terrible and so it’s unsurprising that few of them are enthusiastic collaborators in the learning process. Their problem is compounded by the fact that refusing to cooperate with school creates a cycle of punishment and defiance, so that in addition to leaving with no good qualifications they often develop bad attitudes and behaviours that make it even harder succeed at work or further study. It’s a shame on a human level that for a substantial minority of children their introduction to work and public life is a humiliating one and on an economic level that their potential to be productive citizens is wasted.

When you’re assessing to find the best you also reveal the worst; there’s no avoiding that. We tried solving this problem with vocational qualifications which were meant to be different from academic ones yet equally respected. It turns out they’re neither so this didn’t work, but the idea of something different in the curriculum is a sound one. We know that some kids will fail academically so we need to ask what else can school offer them that can be a source of pride and set them up for success in later life?

Get down to business

Enterprise can be part of the solution; put students in small groups and have them set up and run their own businesses. The big difference between this, and say BTEC Business, is that they could earn money. This makes it radically different from anything currently in the curriculum, acts as an olive branch to reset strained relations between students and school and creates a powerful incentive for those students to improve their behaviour in order to be allowed to participate. Money talks but this is not a mere bribe. To earn this money students would need to develop a product or service, market themselves to find customers and then keep them by consistently delivering on their promises. This would be truly general vocational education. Vocational, because the output is actions not words and general because the skills developed are highly prized across all sectors of the economy. There wouldn’t be any pigeonholing of these kids, as there is with some vocational programmes, as doers of a specific job like hairdressing or car repair.

Conceptually we know this can work as many schools have Young Enterprise like schemes as extra curricular activities. These just need scaling up so that they run for the entire 11-16 secondary phase and are given teaching time, which can be allocated from the vocational qualifications currently sat by around 40% of students and which do little or nothing to improve the future prospects of their candidates.

Running businesses would promote teamwork in a way that groupwork, the school system’s current means of teaching collaboration fails to do, because the success of the team would matter and all its members would have a concrete stake in it. The market does the assessment; all the teacher needs to do is publish a league table of the companies ranked by profit. The competitive dynamics are healthier here than in the academic domain because the correlation between effort and reward is much stronger in the case of a cake stand or car wash than it is with algebra or poetry criticism. Furthermore, while in any field few people can aspire to be the most successful individual, everyone can aspire to be part of the most successful team.

Love’s labours lost

Another area of the curriculum that could provide more opportunities for success is the arts. We treat these as academic subjects so what we call, say drama, on the timetable is the study of drama and the end result is an assessment where the teacher/exam board determines how well the students understand and write about drama. Imagine if instead of that, students rehearsed in those lessons and put on termly shows. By the time your child was fourteen you could have seen them in a series of nine plays; how amazing would it be to witness their development as a performer like that? Combine that with exhibitions of their art work, concerts, festivals. Schools have the opportunity to create affordable, enjoyable events for families to enjoy while giving their students a chance to shine somewhere other than the exam hall.

Go panthers!

Having regular arts events combines nicely with businesses because you’re bringing a customer base onto school premises. Sport can fulfil this role too. I always felt a pang of jealousy watching Friday Night Lights that in parts of America it’s apparently normal for a whole town to come out and watch school kids play sport - why can’t we have that? It’s cheap entertainment, it strengthens the bond between school and community and it’s another chance for kids to hone their entrepreneurial skills by selling drinks, snacks and merch.

Some view the negative impact of coming bottom at school as a problem with competition itself and seek to eliminate situations where one child wins and another loses. This is disingenuous because school itself is a giant contest with significant economic consequences for how you place and it’s also disrespectful to those who come bottom academically as it implicitly denies their ability to win anything anywhere. The issue isn’t that academic achievement is a competition; it’s that this competition completely dominates the school experience. In other words we have too little competition and not too much.

The proposed changes to vocational and arts education above are steps to remedying this problem, another tool is the house system. Dividing students into houses and having them compete is powerful because it drastically lowers the barrier of entry. Eleven kids can play on the school football team; house team you’re taking anyone willing to put on the shirt. Sadly, in state schools there’s a tendency to see it just as a means of organising pastoral care, but it’s the range of competitions and the celebrations of them in assemblies and notice boards that make it a valuable addition to school life.

Evidence of learning

Over the past twenty years schools in England have have made heroic efforts to boost academic achievement and have made real progress. But narrowing the focus to just exam results has negative consequences for those whose exam results are bad. If instead of a print out of grades, students left school with a CV that listed their academic results, their experience running a small business for five years and the highlights of their sporting and artistic achievements then many more of them would be able to say to prospective employers “this is why you should hire me”. Counter intuitively this could lead to improvements in overall academic performance. The main drag at the moment is the difficulty of motivating low attaining students. If those students were successful at something and had a more positive attitude towards school as a result, it would be easier to convince them to try in areas where they struggle.

“You win some. You lose some” is a healthy lesson for children to learn. The big problem with school is that some kids win everything the school deems important and other kids lose. The kids that lose are angry, dejected and often rude but can you blame them?

We can’t change the fact that some people are smarter than others, but we can change school so that those who are less intelligent have a chance to succeed at something other than essays and exams. It won’t be the case that every academic failure is a stunning success on the stage, the sports field or the boardroom, life isn’t fair like that, but some will be and they deserve the chance to prove it. All children should have a shot at leaving school with their head held high.

The solution they hit upon was vocational qualifications and as it was the first attempt at solving this problem they assumed it would work brilliantly. Introducing National Vocational Qualifications in 1986 Lord Young of Graffham said “Far from causing a divide, this proposal will heal the divide that exists today among those who benefit from the school system and those who do not.”. Five years later in the white paper Education and Training for the 21st century, which paved the way for the General National Vocational Qualification (GNVQ), John Major said: “we will end the artificial divide between academic and vocational qualifications, so that young people can pursue the kind of education that best suits their needs.”

Parity of esteem on the spreadsheet

The term vocational education suggests learning how to do a particular job, but that has never been practical to do at a mass scale in school. Job training typically requires resources and space beyond what’s available; where schools do try to go down this route it tends to be a limited (and sexist) offer along the lines of bricklaying or hairdressing. GNVQs were the first iteration of a qualification deemed vocational but deliverable within the constraints of a secondary school. Taught in classrooms, their final grades were awarded for a pile of externally moderated coursework. Those who said this was really just an academic qualification minus rigorous assessment could be dismissed as snobs; the value of a GNVQ (4 GCSEs) was indisputable where it mattered, in school performance measures.

New Labour tried to improve vocational education by getting schools to specialise in one area. The 14-19 Diploma envisioned each school choosing one subject “line of learning” with students leaving their main school for their diploma lessons at whichever different school had racked up their preferred line. Even in places where transport links between neighbouring schools exist (a tiny minority) this was still barking mad. Only a few schools were brave enough to try it and it was scrapped as soon as the next government came along.

The Big Bad Wolf

That government, the Conservative Lib Dem coalition, commissioned Alison Wolf to review vocational qualifications and her report, released in 2011, was a change from the ‘if we say it it will be true’ magical thinking that had come before. While recognising that there are high value vocational courses at Level 3 (A Level equivalent) it showed that many vocational courses have zero or negative impacts on the earning potential of their students. For students aged 14-16 the value of the qualifications on offer was dubious and certainly well below that claimed for them in school accountability measures. The Wolf Report stated, quoting professor Lorna Unwin, “There is only one real Level 2. Maths and English A*-C.”

The impact of Wolf on this age group was therefore defensive, it aimed to stop vocational qualifications crowding out academic ones by limiting performance table points to one qualification per student. However, it did not propose any changes to the qualifications to make them better, probably scared off by the fact the Diploma had been such a binfire.

Today, as far as 14-16 vocational education goes, we’re living in the world Wolf settled for. It’s rare for students to take more than one vocational qualification but 40% of them take at least one. The most popular of these is OCR National award in Sport (41,444 entries in 2025), followed by level 1/2 award in Hospitality and Catering s (39,416 entries) and BTEC First in Health and Social Care (36,310 entries). For each of these the assessment is broadly similar - an exam of about an hour and a couple of controlled assessments (extended writing tasks done under supervision in the classroom.). There are vocational elements like cooking / playing sport but the key test, and the focus of two years of study, is how you write about doing these things.

What are they for?

You might argue that if English is one half of all that matters at age 14-16 then the fact that these are academic qualifications made easier is a good thing, but that assumes that all students work diligently towards the goal of academic improvement and the limiting factor for the low achievers is how much time they have to practise. Time is not the limiting factor though - it’s motivation. School is a dispiriting place if you’re in the 35% of kids who don’t get grade 4 in English and Maths; having the bit of the curriculum that’s supposed to be different be more of the same adds to the disillusionment.

This is not a weakness of the specific design of these qualifications, it’s an inevitable consequence of them being qualifications. Once you’ve decided an external body will moderate students’ work and be able to justify why student X gets a Merit and student Y gets a Distinction then the work in question can’t be a meal or a sporting performance, it has to be durable and comparable so it has to be written down.

Sport, cooking and care giving are all highly valuable activities to improve at, whether or not you go on to do them professionally, likewise running a business or producing digital content. Remove the straitjacket of external assessment and there is scope for schools to be far more creative in how they develop these skills, while breaking up the monotony of academic struggle for kids who find reading and writing difficult and off putting. These kids don’t need more reminding that this one thing they struggle with is really important; they need to know there are other things they can excel at, that failure as a writer does not have to mean failure as a person.

The promise of vocational qualifications for 14-16 year olds was that they represent a different kind of learning from, and equally valuable alternative to, academic study. The reality is that they are a watered down version of GCSEs with little value as stepping stones to jobs or further study. Meanwhile the opportunity cost of their assessment practice is that the chance to carve out a space in the curriculum genuinely separate from academic study is wasted. Scrapping them won’t do any harm to the kids who, in Lord Young’s words, do not benefit from the school system, but if you trust that system to innovate without tying its hands behind its back, an alternative approach could give them a source of pride and achievement away from the written word and save them from despair at the challenge of academic study.

Doubtless that thought combined with the difficulties of changing a complex system like school is what led to the spread of groupwork, which purports to nurture the vital skill of collaboration within the existing constraints of the classroom. This is a grave mistake though, because group work is teamwork’s evil twin, a dark perversion of the art of cooperation and it would be better if every second in the classroom was spent in monkish silence than in this twisted practice.

Groupwork, where typically three or four students are instructed to work together to produce a piece of writing or a presentation, suffers from two fatal flaws. The first is that although it will be stipulated that all the group must participate, in practice there will be no enforcement of this. Consequences, if they ensue at all, will only kick in if no work is produced at all, not if work is produced but the rest of the group were free-riders on the effort of the most conscientious - indeed that is the standard result of group work. As you’re reading this blog there’s a better than even chance you were one of those geeky pillars propping up this rotting edifice but remember you’re in the minority here, most children respond to a group task by thinking “someone will have to do this work, but it doesn’t have to be me”.

The second great flaw is that the group in question has no identity; no one has a stake in its success or failure beyond possible consequences for them as individuals. This is the key difference from teamwork where the success of the team is the ultimate goal towards which the effort of each individual is pooled. Groupwork purports to nurture the vital skill of working with others, while swapping out “come together for a common cause” with “try or don’t try according to a calculation of your self interest”. We’re not throwing the baby out with the bath water here, we’re holding it under until it drowns.

You might think describing the mundane practice of how children are sometimes given homework in these terms hyperbolic, but that underrates the importance of education. At school we learn a lot of knowledge, some of which we forget immediately some more slowly as the years roll on, but alongside this explicit instruction is a deeper, unconscious process of learning how the world of work works. We learn the difference between professional and casual behaviour, how tasks go from conception through execution to review and when it comes to working with our peers we learn that shared tasks are either a chore to be avoided or a vehicle for self promotion.

The generation raised with groupwork, roughly those who were at school this century, enter the workplace viewing the idea that they should do anything that’s not explicitly their job with suspicion and that they should do part of someone else’s job with horror. They experience a manager’s attempts to make them do these things not as the inevitable back and forth of being an individual serving an organisation whose goals supersede their own interests, but as vindictiveness. The idea that they be singled out and made to do a task that could be done by anyone is so alien that it can only have come from malice. Businesses, charities and public sector bodies invest millions in correcting these attitudes in us as adults, but it’s a mostly futile struggle because the first principles we lay down on any subject are so hard to dislodge.

Groupwork is an object lesson in the folly of taking a system that works, in this case students being taught academic subjects, and tacking on to it a noble goal, teamwork, without thinking through whether the change actually serves the intended purpose. Teamwork is important enough to consider more radical changes to the school curriculum to embed it properly, but groupwork actively harms our ability to work together and should be put in the bin.

Of recorded thefts in financial year 2024/2025, 8% resulted in a summons to appear in court. When found guilty the vast majority of defendants receive a fine. Such low odds of being caught, combined with the fact that if you are, the penalty will be to repay some of what you’ve stolen is clearly a very weak deterrent.

The numbers being imprisoned for theft have also gone up since before the pandemic but due to changes to sentencing guidelines discouraging short sentences these will be serious, repeat offenders. Prison is ruinously expensive, to taxpayers and even more so to the convicted. Like parents who ignore their children’s misbehaviour before snapping, screaming and smacking, our response is first too lenient and then too harsh.

We need a form of punishment that’s more effective than non custodial sentences and cheaper than prison. Luckily we don’t have to invent a new solution to this problem we can revive an old one: the stocks. Make people sit in a public place next to a sign explaining their crime so that passers by can see they broke the law. This would be deeply unpleasant (the shame of it would no doubt be compounded by sharing of photos and videos online) but it would be over in a matter of hours and the criminal would be able to begin their rehabilitation straight away, without the disruption to work and family life that prison wreaks.

The stocks fell out of favour during the Victorian period when an increasingly professional state sought to tackle society’s problems with as little input from the man, or the mob, on the street as possible. We’re at the other end of that tunnel now. The professional state is swamped with problems it can’t fix and the mob is us, ordinary citizens who are sick of subsidising those who take what they want without paying.

Committing crimes is dishonourable; it’s right to use shame to correct that behaviour and it’s right to recruit the law-abiding majority as partners in inflicting that shame. To say to the criminals making society more expensive and worse that we, the people who play by the rules, think their behaviour is bad and we want it to stop.

The IEA estimated the size of the UK’s market for cannabis to be £2.6 billion in 2017 which is £3.5 billion in today’s pounds. While we’re not trying to stop this trade in any serious way, the pretence that we are means that all this money flows to petty criminals. Given the state of the public finances is that a good choice?

We could use this money to help those whose lives are derailed by drug use. It could fund a functioning child mental health system, something we lack at present, which could intervene before young people turn to drugs as way of coping with other issues.

That being said, we should be respectful of the free market and what it could do to us if let loose on this product line. Legalisation should come with safeguards to minimise the chance of recreational drug users becoming problem ones. There is a way to do this though, and it maximises the revenue raised: the government becomes the monopoly seller of marijuana, ecstasy, ketamine and psychedelics.

The disadvantages of state monopolies, lack of innovation, occasional shortages, etc are upsides in this case - the goal is not, as it would be in a fully legal market, to sell as much as possible but to raise revenue from light, recreational use while minimising consumption at levels likely to lead to health problems. There’d be no advertising and no actor in the system with an incentive for users to consume more drugs than are compatible with a healthy and productive life.

A direct payment system (drugs.gov) could help to keep people on the recreational side of the divide. The drift into a problematic drug habit runs through self deception but here the app you buy with tells you how much you’ve bought recently, how your use compares with others, whether your consumption is steady or increasing. In the case of ketamine, a warning that you personally are on a trajectory that will lead to medical problems would be more powerful than our current untargeted messaging about the side effects of sustained use.

Prices could also scale, so every purchase of drugs raises the price you pay next time unless you wait for it to drop back down. As well as discouraging high consumption this would also make it unviable to be an illegal reseller of legally obtained supply. The goal should be to find the balance where the general price point is low enough to drive out illegal supply while heavy personal use is made prohibitively expensive.

Just because we’ve given up trying police public recreational drug use doesn’t mean we have to embrace it. I think it should be legal to smoke weed in the privacy of your home but I don’t want you walking past my kids on the street with a joint in your hand. Here, paradoxically, a legal regime allows us to be more restrictive than prohibition. We could give the police discretionary power to remove a citizen’s right to buy drugs. Anyone caught smoking in public has their face scanned and a ban on further purchase applied - it could be done on a phone in seconds. This would be a far more effective deterrent than the status quo where theoretically you could face criminal sanction for smoking in public but realistically you never will.

Almost three million people use drugs according to the crime survey of England and Wales and yet we’re not living through a crisis of drug related harms because the vast majority of those people are doing so occasionally while otherwise living respectable lives. Over two thirds of them used drugs less frequently than once a month while for just under half it was only once or twice a year. There’s no sign that prohibition is holding down that level of consumption either; four out of ten adults in the survey said it would be very or fairly easy to obtain drugs within 24 hours.

We have a fiscal crisis and we have a way to take billions of pounds out of the pockets of criminals and put them straight into the treasury. Legal but not commercial supply has safeguards to ensure that drug use does not cross over from recreational to problematic and is confined to appropriate places and times. We’re already suffering what downsides there are of widespread recreational drug use - let’s admit that and enjoy the upside too.